For many years now I have found myself returning to a place I can only call the Great Hall — a place I did not so much discover as simply begin to notice, the way one notices a familiar building on a road walked many times before. It is a large and well-appointed place, full of people and purpose and the sounds of an institution that knows its own importance. I have watched it from the hill, and from the courtyard, and from just inside the door, and what I have seen there has stayed with me in the way that things stay with us when they are not quite finished teaching us what they have to say. These are the stories I have gathered from those long hours of watching. I offer these thoughts not as accusations but as questions — the kind that rise in you quietly, on a hillside, when you love a place and cannot stop wondering what it was always meant to be.